Earticle

This paper examines the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's philosophy of unification related to Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Christianity, and analyzes Korea-Japan Undersea Tunnel project, the Great Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere by the Imperialist Japan, a Japanese student’s “future-solve-past model” for regionalism, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s East Asian Finance Community, and some existing theories for regionalism in Northeast Asia in the regional level. In the state level, this paper will studies Moon’s ideas and the Buddhist monk Wonhyo’s thoughts for the unification of the Korean peninsula.

The purpose of this study is to analyze policy competition and conflict behaviors by policy types in Korean local governments. This paper answers three research questions. First, what causal conditions influence policy adoption in Korean local governments? The configurations of policy determinants are examined by a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). Second, what are different causal conditions for policy types? By Peterson’s three policy types, causal configurations of each type are compared. Third, which conditions do affect the time lag of policy adoption in Korean local governments? The time lag of policy adoption among the three policies is estimated, and the causal conditions are compared among them. For the analysis, pooled time series data are generated by combining the data sets between 2003 and 2012. The results show that the causal combinations of the policy adoption are as follows: developmental policy adoption is affected by political factors and economic characteristics influence redistributive policy adoption. Allocational policy adoption reflects both socioeconomic and political aspects. In the time lag analysis, local governments adopt policies in order of allocational, redistributive and developmental policies. The results partially agree with Peterson’s scheme and show the various configurative explanations for policy adoption by systematic comparisons of the adoption behaviors of each policy type in Korean local governments.

No matter what kind of the power configuration and regional security order are emerging in East Asia, the most critical strategic challenge for countries like Korea, with their limited hard and soft power, is how to position itself and seek ways to cope with their strategic interactions between the two superpowers. Neither ower balancing practices such as balancing against nor opportunistic bandwagoning with the rising power seem to be useful bilateral strategic schemes for Korea in the midst of great power rivalry, as shown in the cases of ASEAN countries who have sought to engage with China in order to expand economic relations, and yet avoid bandwagoning with it due to their suspicions of China's intentions in the region. Thus, Korea's strategic thoughts for changing global and regional order should be proactively developed in terms of its own growing national status and capacities, as well as from the geopolitical perspectives. In this context, the paper examines the development of China's multilateral diplomacy in East Asia and the U.S. attempt to counterbalance China in the multilateral settings. Taking a lesson from the achievements and limits of ASEAN in the regional architecture, it is argued that although Korea has few choices in terms of strengthening the Korea-US alliance and pursuing a balanced strategy of assertiveness and accommodation in its bilateral relations with regional states, the country should exert its decision-making influences on specific issues and in multilateral or mini-lateral settings.

In the 21st century, economic globalization and educational internationalization have driven the whole world develop foreign language education urgently. East Asian countries, including South Korea, China, and Japan, are also confronted with a severe task to initiate appropriate and sound foreign language education policy in order to catch up with the globalization pace through building up Asian Economic Community. This paper firstly reviews the history of foreign language education policy making in East Asian countries – Korea, China, and Japan. It then analyzes the strategy features of foreign language education policy and predicts future orientation of foreign language education strategy in East Asia. At last, it further puts forward the assumption of establishing Asian Common Framework of Foreign Language Proficiency Scales.

Regional dispersion of Korean FDI in Mongolia has a number of significant implications for both Korean firms and Korea. Thus, identifying FDI opportunities in the Mongolian regions and developing ways and strategies to utilize these opportunities are a major challenge for Korea to disperse its FDI regionally throughout Mongolia. Despite of it, however, the research on it has been conducted very insufficiently. The study, therefore, aimed to identify FDI opportunities in the Mongolian regions and recommend how Korean firms to develop FDI strategies to utilize them and regionally disperse in Mongolia. The study finds that first, there are many FDI opportunities in different sectors of the Central, Western, Khangai and Eastern regions of Mongolia, and Korean firms have the possibility to take these opportunities in a way to make technology- and equipment-intensive FDI. Second, by developing FDI strategies reflected product markets, infrastructure, free zones, production and technology parks, competitiveness and investment incentives of the four Mongolian regions, Korean firms can make technology- and equipment-intensive FDI in Mongolia more effectively and through it, Korean FDI in Mongolia can be more effectively dispersed regionally in Mongolia.